Grit Lab Report

Hi Annalisa,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 3: I’m actively figuring out what my interests are by trying one or more of them out in some way .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were benevolence, tradition, and universalism.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were social, musical, and verbal.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you felt totally clear about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to run the love run .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Go to bed early / wake up early .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Being more productive when well-rested .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Late night meetings + procrastination .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I get back to my dorm, I will get ready for bed .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in viola .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt when receiving critical feedback, and when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being everything .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel thankful .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Grit is malleable.
Interest is an emotion.
Personality states vary a lot.
Goal fusion can make tasks less tedious
Goals help bridge the intention-action gap
To enter the flow state you perceived level of skill and challenge must be equal
Coping with failure depends on how you appraise the goal
Role models are important because they provide motivation and information, and ideal mentors are authoritative with high standards for you.
Self transcendence is having a top level goal that serves beyond-the-self purpose

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Daniel Min
Hey Annalisa! I wanna say that you always brought a calming and friendly energy to all our discussions. I really appreciated how you were always such a great listener and chimed in when you had valuable input to give. I also really appreciated how you were able to take jokes really well and appreciate you laughing at some of mine too. I also really appreciated how interesting your Creative Writing Discovery Project was. I also p a pursued a more creative pursuit in my Discovery Project, so was really helpful to hear how much having your old friend was valuable in your project. I think even though I did have a friend who I could talk to throughout my project, I never had an accountability partner. I want to continue doing my content creation and your project shed more light into how much I need to focus on building a community around me.
Carma Rishani
Annalisa, from the moment I sat next to you in our class, I sensed such a serene, calm and wise energy emanating from you. After our initial conversation I was shocked that you were just a sophomore as your depth of thought and wisdom truly transcended your years. Over the course of the semester, getting to know you has been a genuine pleasure - from your profound love for music to your sincere interest in psychology and creative writing. Your ability to be an attentive listener, coupled with your ability to speak so concisely and yet say so much with your words is a true gift. I really appreciate how much you have opened up throughout the course of this class and shared personal, yet immensely valuable stories that have fostered deep and enriching conversations. I love how your Discovery Project was about rediscovering your passion for creative writing. I appreciated hearing about your Discovery Project BFF and how that led to mindset changes, allowing you to feel inspired once more, as well as just feeling supported throughout the experience. The IRL aspect of your project where you had to write long form personal narrative underscored that this experience meant more than just rekindling your writing. I feel like it is hard for most to open up and be vulnerable, especially in prose, and you spoke about how this was a deeper obstacle for you given that you are a more private person. Yet, I am so happy that you did, that you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone to share stories that you were passionate about, it showed incredible courage and I hope inspired you to share more stories with the world!
Jessica Lin
Every time Annalisa spoke in our group discussions, she had something interesting to contribute to the conversation. I have come to respect her ability to contribute to the discussion meaningfully while letting other people take the spotlight when they wanted it more. I think this speaks to Annalisa's quiet confidence and how she doesn't need to be in the spotlight or to be the loudest to add value to our group dynamic; this is something I am trying to work on so it was inspiring to see Annalisa possess this ability. Annalisa is an amazing listener and her attentiveness in our group discussions has shown me that there is more than one way to make other's feel seen and heard. As someone who is not very creative, I found Annalisa's discovery project on creative writing extremely refreshing and insightful. While I used to associate creativity with spontaneity, as Annalisa's discovery project presentation showed me, being creative also requires discipline and deliberate practice. From what I've seen, I think Annalisa's discovery project aligns well with her personality; I can definitely see Annalisa's strength of her ability to listen to others contribute to her creative writing skills.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.